Topic: people buying used miners - page 2. (Read 4762 times)

I think they are all overpriced on ebay and will never make ROI... but as a hobbyist, thats probably the only way to buy a 1TH machine quickly like a KnC. For ROI, I'll stick with products that actually deliver on time like Antminer S1s instead of Ebay. Also beware of scams on ebay especially when people try to sell you their pre-orders from BFL and such. These forums are full of sorry tales of getting scammed on them.

And use common sense. If a machine was making ROI and tons of BTC, why on earth would anyone sell it to you?

As far as USB ones go, remember you can buy them brand new for $15 a piece at today's BTC/USD price. Anything above that is you throwing your money away. It's still too pricey for me (price per ghs) but someone is buying these for sure

https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020140227111546291QgbvQbVr06FB

Are we talking for the usb miners only?

I like to have one or two of my old USBs solo mining. I know I know, the odds are ridiculous but just for fun

If you're mining Bitcoin with USB ASICs, then you're doing it wrong. There are other SHA256 coins which offer a faster RoI. Mining newly launched coins for speculative purposes also speeds up getting your RoI by at least a factor of 5 (based on my experience, not generalized facts).

LOL

The key to being successful or at least make back what you invested is to only mine for about 45-90 days max then sale on eBay.. Then take all the bitcoin you mined plus the money from sales on eBay and upgrade to the next best miner.. This is the only way to keep up with the difficulty rise and stay in the game.. We are getting close to a point where its going to slow down some with the advancement in hashing power making it more modular so you can keep building on what you got allready going. After 20mm miners are more wide spread I see it pretty hard to get much more hashing power for what technology we have available. Under .5 watts per Gh/s will be hard to beat I think...

I just started mining. I bought an Antminer U1 (1.6GH/s) off Amazon. I think I paid around $60 which was more than I should have... I found some later for around $40... but it got my foot in the door and helped me to figure out how this stuff all works, or at least gave me the illusion of understanding! 

Once I got a little comfortable with it I bought a 5 blade BTC Garden Miner setup that runs at about 40GH/s total. I just got it up and running a few hours ago. I'm going to let that run for a few weeks to see if it measures out relatively close to the estimating calculators online. After that I plan on investing into several Antminer S1's that run at 180GH/s...

So far so good... Just trying to better understand how the luck works and the best way to manage my miners. But those little USB things is how I got started...

Brandon

The increasing difficulty and reducing payout per block mean that Block Erupters already have a trivial value and will fairly quickly be entirely worthless. There is no 'leave it on and after a long time it will return something'.

I did some calculations last Monday (St. Patrick's day - I'm Irish) :

If I started mining (24/7) with a Block Erupter on March 17th then the Bitcoin returns would be :
In 1 month : 0.0011 BTC   =  USD 0.69
In 3 months : 0.002357 BTC  =   USD 1.48
in 1 year : 0.003549 BTC  =  USD 2.22
in 2 years : 0.003603 BTC  = USD 2.26

So it will earn only 4 US cents from Paddy's day 2015 to Paddy's day 2016 (and use 43Kwh of electricity in doing it - not including the power costs of the infrastructure)

There are approximations in this (pool type - hardware growth [i.e difficulty changes] etc) - but if anything they are conservative as the more power that comes on stream the higher the difficulty curve goes and the sooner these little USB miners become completely worthless as miners. 

The residual value from selling the BEs on Ebay is by far the most significant factor in their current value - so sell 'em while they're still worth something.

The same maths worth for any  piece of mining hardware - the only question is where on the curve it is - but pretty much everything on sale on Ebay (even the newest, fastest and least power hungry of the USB miners) is selling for more than its medium turn return and most are selling for more than their total future return.

And if the underlying belief is that BTC will increase in value enough to make it worth while - then the correct response is to invest in existing Bitcoin.

John SL

entertainment purposes = wow, look every month i'm loosing money to energy cost and I overpaid for the amount of coins I am getting? wtf

Some may just be a novelty. The hash rate just isn't profitable. Sentimental value perhaps?

^^^^^^^^^^ this

For what it's worth, I agree with you. The novelty / geeky-fun factor is what is relevant here. Some people would run these things even if there was no hope of a profit. That there is one (hope of a profit) makes it all the more appealing.

I'm not saying he will have 1btc. I'm saying what if one = 50k in years to come. For a USB miner and just letting it roll, it's kind of like their own little mini faucet. That $10 investment was insanely easy to make and could generate a good return. I'm just trying to say some people wanna dabble in mining and see what happens without going balls deep. What have they lost if it craters?

The most often cited argument against that is that it would have been more profitable to purchase BTC with fiat now rather than a miner. For a $600 investment you return $49,400. For $600 worth of usb block erupters (30 of them?) at 10GHS you'll "never" mine 1BTC, however you'll pay roughly $100/yr in electricity at 0.15/kwh and depending on the difficulty it is debatable whether "never" is actually true. At any rate, in 6 years of mining you'll have spent $600 in electricity which is what that 1BTC would have cost you in the first place, and you wouldn't have had the hassle of babysitting them. Oh, and I also left out the cost of running a computer or PI 24/7 because some people do that anyway, yadda yadda. The argument works without factoring it in.

Now if you have cheap/free electricity and you pay for your used miners with BTC and you make some calculations about the equipment's longevity and the rate of difficulty increases, you may find that you can return a profit in BTC, which is worth it.

People were willing to "waste" electricity on computing activities such as Distributed.NET, Prime95, SETI@home, Folding@home, etc when there was no chance of seeing a positive ROI. Mining has a far better ROI (positive or not) than any of those activities, and they were in no way small endeavors.

What if they buy this and just let that mofo roll and go long term. Would they be stupid if in 2020 1BTC=$50,000 USD?

You forget that there are other coins that they can dip their toes into other than bitcoins. So maybe people want to try this..

http://www.112bit.com/product/antminer-s1-dual-blade/

Easily OC to 200GH/s. Pretty damn close.

I don't think there is such a miner. Maybe if you buy second hand, don't pay VAT and the miner eats incredible amounts of electricity. And you get it next winter.

I would not say its sad at all.  No one forced them to buy anything I offered.  Also my margins were hundreds of percent less than most things you buy on a daily basis.  That drink from Mcdonalds or coffee from Starbucks, do you know the margins on those?  thousands of percent!!  I was only offering a product, that they would not know how to get otherwise, and since I have experience and have invested my time in the game and learned the ins and outs, I feel like I should be the one making money.  Would it be different in any other industry?  Those with the knowledge make the money, how do you gain knowledge?  You invest time and effort.  I was willing to do that, those paying high prices did not, but instead decided they would take a chance without fully understanding what they were doing.  That hardly sounds like its my fault.

Praytell, where can I buy mining hardware for less than $3/Ghash?

Assume I don't want to budget more than $1000.

I would also comment that these devices on e-bay are "in hand", meaning they may ship in less than "two weeks".